Since its founding in 2019, All Elite Wrestling has proven itself to be a wrestling company run by people who are enthusiastic about pro wrestling. This enthusiasm has extended to video games, as AEW is working with Yuke’s, developers of WWE games from 2000 to 2018, to develop a wrestling video game for them.
While it all sounds promising, every wrestling fan has a set of expectations of what a wrestling game should be, especially one from AEW. So what do we want to see from an AEW game?
10 Season Mode
More than simulating matches and living vicariously through their characters’ achievements, there’s a huge group of wrestling fans who want to play booker. After all, the WWE games have proven it’s a great way to let off steam when the actual TV shows aren’t going well. An AEW game would need a mode where fans can book their own weekly programming, building storylines that lead to pay-per-views. Of course, booking for AEW Dark would mean having an infinite number of slots for matches.
9 Match Types AEW Hasn’t Done Yet -- Or Can’t Do
While of course fans want to recreate all the matches they’ve already seen on television -- the Exploding Barbed Wire Deathmatch, Mimosa Mayhem, the Cracker Barrel Clash -- a wrestling game should go beyond reality. This doesn’t just mean including match types that AEW hasn’t done, like an Ambulance Match, for example. It’d be great for there to also be some match types that are impossible to do in real life, especially since the game doesn’t appear to be striving to be a 100% realistic wrestling simulator.
8 Create-A-Wrestler
A must for any wrestling game, AEW’s venture into video games must have a rich character creation suite. With customizable appearances, movesets, entrances, and even finishing moves themselves, the obligatory character creation mode allows fans to basically create their own wrestling world, incorporating wrestlers who aren't built into the game.
WWE’s had create-a-wrestler modes for years, and those of Fire Pro Wrestling are beloved. There are entire fan subcultures built around running virtual promotions, so it would be a misstep for the AEW video game to not follow in those footsteps.
7 Customizable Characters
This desire is distinct from the create-a-wrestler mode. One of the underratedly cool things about WWF No Mercy back in the day was the ability to edit the actual roster members, changing their appearance to an absurd degree. It would offer the ability to change characters as they change in real life, or as a player’s season mode progresses. For example should a wrestler lose an eye in the storyline, the player would be able to put an eyepatch on them.
6 Blood & Guts
One “traditional” match type from AEW that should be in the game is the War Games style Blood & Guts match. With staggered entrances and no pinfalls, it’s an opportunity for players to inflict damage and general mayhem upon opponents until everyone’s in the ring and somebody gives up. It would be a big deal, too as, it seems like no major wrestling game has ever incorporated it -- not even WWE games -- so it would be a major coup for AEW’s game to pull it off.
5 Roster Updates
One of the big problems with wrestling games is that the actual show is constantly evolving while the game is in development, so by launch date the wrestling world being captured is always a little outdated. Maybe a tag team’s broken up or somebody turned heel and changed their look, and that can’t be reflected in the game. It feels increasingly crucial for the game to look like the TV show, so players definitely want regular updates with new looks and signees.
4 The Game To Actually Work
Outside of more die-hard niche games like Fire Pro Wrestling, Total Extreme Wrestling, and Wrestling Revolution 3D, WWE has pretty much no competition when it comes to more mainstream-friendly pro wrestling games. This, of course, meant that it’s been a while since wrestling fans have had to suffer the disaster that was WWE 2K20, which suffered myriad problems at launch.
Not coincidentally, 2K20 was the first WWE game not developed by Yuke’s, so fans should expect AEW’s game to be of a quality similar to the developer’s WWE efforts -- but hopefully even better than that.
3 A Story Mode
Different from a Season or GM mode, it would be very cool for there to be a story mode where perhaps players are able to create a custom character and work their way up the rankings in AEW, starting as enhancement talent on Dark and eventually reaching the title picture. The aforementioned No Mercy set the bar high even back in 2000 with its story mode, which branched off in different directions depending on how certain matches went. These modes can often by silly, but there’s a lot of fun to be had with a freewheeling promotion like AEW in video game form.
2 Stadium Stampede
The 2020 edition of Double or Nothing brought one of the most entertaining matches in the year in the form of the Stadium Stampede, in which The Elite and The Inner Circle fought all over a football stadium in a pseudo-cinematic match. It’s wild stuff, with the use of horses, a bar fight, and a wrestling ring in the middle of a football field. If an AEW game is going to incorporate any match from its own programming, an over-the-top affair like Stadium Stampede is a must.
1 AKI Man
AEW has thus far been very good at acknowledging and incorporating wrestling history into its storytelling, with wrestlers’ pasts being used to enhance angles rather than ignored to make sure they hit the broadest possible audience. As such, it feels like the upcoming AEW game has to include AKI Man, an original cult-favorite character created for WCW/nWo Revenge who went on to appear in No Mercy. Yuke’s didn’t create AKI Man -- that was AKI, now known as syn Sophia -- but they could probably license him to appear in the game. It’d be an even bigger get than CM Punk.